Folks, this is driving me nuts, and it's getting intolerable. Apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum, or a dupe. I've looked, for days, but not seen any other postings which look like the same problem.

System: Toshiba Portege 3490, PIII 700, 256MB Ram, 60g HD. Toshiba external multimedia docking station with a 3d cardbus slot, intel 10/100 ethernet, and a DVD-RW. The multimedia dock is connected via a cable (basically an extension to the PCI bus) and contains another IDE bridge, another USB controller, and another cardbus bridge.

Symptom: Lockups of devices. NOT system lockups. Typically, I would use either the wired ethernet or an atheros wireless card with the madwifi drivers, and connect a USB mouse to the usb controller on the multimedia dock. When I upgraded to 2.6.10 from 2.6.7, I began to experience lockups. Typically, in X, using the mouse would cause the mouse and the network (either one) to hang. Curiously, the X cursor remained accessable via the builtin (PS/2) pointing stick.

I have since duplicated this lockup under the following conditions:

- In a console window, with either net adaptor, using the mouse with gpm. Typically, 20-30 seconds of mouse activity trigger the hang.

- Again, in the console, with either net adaptor, burning a CD with the aforementioned burner causes a lock, typically after 130-150 MB of content.

- From the console, or from within X, attaching a USB CD burner and attempting to burn a disk causes a hang almost immediately.

The most interesting part of the whole business is that I get NOTHING in the logs to indicate what is going on. I've recompilled the kernel(s) about a bazillion times removing anything and everything that I thought could possibly be the problem, all to no avail. I can post the kernel .config file if requested, but I'm alreading flooding in a LOT more code listing that I would like.....

and I note that ALL the offending devices are on IRQ 11. This was not the case with the 2.6.7 kernel. Note that the boot arg mentioned above has no effect on the interrupt assignment, or on the hangups.

Have you thought of posting a bug related to the kernel that you're using and your system? Maybe it's a hardware issue that's been addressed with a patch or possibly something that has not been addressed yet that needs to be addressed.

Also, I heard that there were issues with some PC's ACPI and IRQ addressing (most notably dells), so I would try disabling ACPI in the kernel and see if that helps solve your issue.

-Symptoms
Text cursor will stop blinking, system will still responde to input and run non-timer sensitive functions (e.g. cat), but any program that requires timer will come to a stop (e.g. top), although programs using rtc works fine (e.g. date, but will date produced will rollback every few second).

"cat /proc/driver/rtc" will show that rtc is still working
"cat /proc/interrupts" will show that timer is no longer generating any interrupts

-When
Happens around 4h after bootup on the 1st NetVista
Happens around 9h after bootup on the 2nd NetVista
The period varies greatly, system is always having the same load running a call generation program, with maximum uptime of 17h only
It does not matter if I run the program or not, it still happens.

-Tried
Enabling and disabling the following in the kernel one at a time (thats why the /proc/interrupts for the 2 machines look so different, I am still playing wiht kernel configs)
HPET
MSI-X
CPU Frequency Scaling
SMP
Preemptible Kernel
ACPI Thermal Zone
APM
Hangcheck (will not work anyway, because timer stop working)
Kernel Parameters tried one at a time: hpet=disable, timer=tsc, timer=pit, timer=pmtmr, timer=cyclone, acpi_skip_timer_override
and more...

Running it under VMware Workstation 4.5 (Windows)
The time will lag behind 2 sec for every 1 sec (around there) where it is too big a margin for ntpd to compensate.

Hmmm... the fact that you're running it behind vmware is an issue to look into because vmware uses an AMD bios I read for emulation purposes. So, maybe you should look into vmware emulation problems or AMD chipsets and interrupt issues.

Hmmm... the fact that you're running it behind vmware is an issue to look into because vmware uses an AMD bios I read for emulation purposes. So, maybe you should look into vmware emulation problems or AMD chipsets and interrupt issues.

Oops, forgot to mention it properly, I mean I also tried to run the above kernel + software configuration under a VMware virtual machine (in another system) and it just lose ticks, but the timer still generate interrupts (maybe i didn't to run it that long yett). The problems mentioned in my post are when Linux is running native on the machines.

I have similar problem in my box, lookups of the timer
I have an notebook wirh I865 chipset, P4 with HT, it seem s that the reason of it is associated with ACPI. When I compile kernel with modular ACPI, and don't load AC module, then problem not happen anymore.

I have similar problem in my box, lookups of the timer
I have an notebook wirh I865 chipset, P4 with HT, it seem s that the reason of it is associated with ACPI. When I compile kernel with modular ACPI, and don't load AC module, then problem not happen anymore.

Hmm... I haven't try that yet, I will try and see if it works on my end.

I have similar problem in my box, lookups of the timer
I have an notebook wirh I865 chipset, P4 with HT, it seem s that the reason of it is associated with ACPI. When I compile kernel with modular ACPI, and don't load AC module, then problem not happen anymore.

Hmm... I haven't try that yet, I will try and see if it works on my end.

Well, tried that, didn't work. Also did try to compile ACPI with no modules, didn't work either.